damn my a.d.d.

so i’m trying to make a php game (commanders) from scratch and it’s not going quite as fast or as easy as i’d hoped. there are a lot of little things that you have to plan for when coding an application from scratch, no matter what it is, that will bite you in the ass.

when i first got the idea for this game, i thought “i’ll get the game part of the script working and the rest will be easy”. nope. first off, i have to get the game part working… it’s not. not quite. secondly, i get distracted by other things WAY too easily. and thirdly, i really have no idea where i’m trying to take this.

i started off with an overly simplistic plan. not on purpose, but because i have no experience coding anything from scratch, after writing a preliminary few hundred lines of code, and trying to test that code, i began to realize that my storage methods (both within the database, and during code execution) were grossly underestimated. it took an almost complete rewrite of the existing methods and all the code that goes with it to get to a point where the game will actually progress the way that i want it to.

but now that i’ve got the game almost working, there are other issues that are creeping in that i wasn’t ready for. for instance, the game that i am creating is actually a port from a real life board game (Power). the trouble with this is that issues that are trivially easy for a person to deal with are intricately difficult for a computer to deal with. i’ll spare you the details, sufice to say that my code is becoming much longer than i had planned. porting form a real board game also has the added benefit of having the rules already written, or at least most of them, but the ones that aren’t written are the ones giving me the troubles. what should i do if this situation happens? what about this other situation?

another issue i have to deal with is myself. when i get in one of those moods, as i’m sure most of you have, where the juices just aren’t flowing, we’ll call it “coders block”, i turn to other items that may not be necessary to the project. i’ve also started another (albeit much smaller, simpler) game (battleship) from scratch which is progressing much faster and therefore holds my interest better. this is bad. even though the new project is nearing completion, i know that i am the type of person who will never think of anything as “completed”.

and on top of all this i am still working on webchess 2.0 (which finally had a beta release not too long ago).

so i now have three projects i’m actively working on, my job, and a freaking network+ test to take on monday.

and i have to spend more time with my wife, who is probably feeling pretty left out at the moment.

so here’s my time division:

my job (30%)

my projects (30%)

eating and sleeping (30%)

studying (10%)

my wife (110%)

if it weren’t for my a.d.d., i’d think i have a real problem.

(note: i’m not officially diagnosed with a.d.d., but most everybody i know would love some ritalin)